Season of Fear

by Brain Freeman

  The photo mocked her, as if she were laughing at herself. Then she noticed something unusual. In the photo, she was pointing backward with her thumb. The gesture highlighted the restaurant behind her, but as she stared at the photo from Justin’s desk, she realized that she was pointing out the window. Outside. Not inside the house.

  Peach got up from the desk. Ignoring the flood of rain, she unlocked the window and threw it open. She jutted her face outside, squinting into the downpour. She saw a lake surrounding the house, rather than the grass and weeds of the yard. The thick, decades-old oak tree was on her left, sprouting huge limbs over the roof. On her right was an old propane tank. Scrub brush in the nearby vacant land grew right up to the edge of the chainlink fence.

  She climbed out the window and dropped into the water. The ground was mud under her feet. The bark of the old oak tree was furrowed with seams and knots, and she examined the larger gaps with her fingers to see if anything was shoved inside. When that proved fruitless, she picked up the empty propane tank, but it was no more than rusted debris. There was almost nothing else in the yard, except a telescoping ladder lying against the foundation. She dragged it out of the water and examined the underside of each step, but Justin hadn’t hidden anything for her there.

  It was another dead end.

  The photograph was just a photograph, not a message.

  Peach returned to the house and shut the window, but it caught on the frame and stayed open half an inch. She was soaked, and she knew she smelled like a wet dog. When she checked her phone again, she saw that Annalie was late. It had been almost ninety minutes since their phone call. When she returned to the living room, she peered through the blinds, hoping to see Annalie’s Corolla arrive outside, but she saw only her own T-Bird parked out front. She dialed her friend’s number on the phone again, but there was no answer. She didn’t leave another message.

  She sat on the torn cushions of the sofa. Drips of water splattered on the carpet. The broken antiques of Justin’s life were in ruins around her. A baroque gold clock with cherubs. A child’s rocking horse with chipped paint. A tapered, rose-colored bottle made of delicate glass. A laughing Buddha with a well-rubbed stomach. Nothing matched anything else. Justin had never cared about a theme for his collection; he simply bought pieces that spoke to him.

  His books were scattered across the floor. Biographies of classical composers like Brahms and Haydn. Eclectic science books covering everything from astronomy to microbiology. Novels and essays from the eighteenth century. Joseph Andrews. Rasselas. Gulliver’s Travels. There were titles in French that she didn’t understand. It was all so … Justin.

  One book caught her eye. She’d missed it before, because it was mostly covered under a record album of Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven’s Fidelio. Sitting on the sofa, she spotted the green cloth cover of a small book of poetry. It was the same book – the same edition – of poetry by William Blake that she’d purchased for him as a birthday present. She frowned to think he’d already owned a copy, but he had never said a word about that when she gave it to him.

  Peach got up from the sofa and picked up the volume. Without even thinking about it, she flipped to the page for ‘The Tyger.’

  He’d written something there, just as he had in the copy she’d found in his apartment. The handwriting was the same. She knew it all too well. This message was no more helpful than the name – Alison – she’d found on the same page in the book she’d given him.

  The message said: You already know the truth.

  Peach shook her head. ‘No, I don’t know,’ she said aloud. ‘Justin, I really don’t know anything.’

  In frustration, she threw the book against the wall, where the binding broke and yellow pages floated to the floor. She was sick of his mysteries. She was sick of his enigmas and codes. He hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her what he was doing, and now she was left to pick up the pieces.

  She sat down on the sofa again and opened the cover of Curtis Ritchie’s laptop. She booted it up on battery power. The thumbnail for Ritchie’s username on the login screen was a close-up photograph of a woman’s breast. That pig. Frowning, she clicked on the thumbnail, and it asked her for a password. Peach swore. She knew nothing about the man, and she had no idea what he might have used as his password. Randomly, she picked things out of her head. 12345. ABCDEF. 00000. After ten unsuccessful tries, she slapped the lid shut.

  This was getting her nowhere. She wondered again: Where was Annalie? She glanced toward the lonely street, which was drowning under the assault of the storm. A finger of worry crept up her spine.

  She grabbed Ritchie’s digital camera. There was only a single bar of power left on the battery indicator; she didn’t have much time to examine it. She opened the file of photographs on the Micro SD card, which consisted of hundreds of pictures, and scrolled to the beginning.

  The first picture she saw was of Justin.

  He was on the beach behind his condominium. He wore ridiculously long swim trunks, and his feet were in the calm surf. He wore headphones connected to a white iPod in his hand. Probably listening to Mozart. Peach clicked to the next photograph. Justin again. And again. Ritchie had been stalking Justin everywhere he went. She saw Justin getting into his car in the office parking lot. Justin eating a Cuban sandwich at the Kooky Coconut. Justin at a St Pete antique mall. She saw herself, too. Ritchie had plenty of photographs of the two of them together. It made her heart ache, because scrolling through the pictures was like looking at a travel album of the final weeks they’d spent together.

  It was also hugely invasive. Ritchie had photographed the two of them inside her house. He’d crept up to the window like a voyeur and snapped shots into her darkened living room. She saw the two of them snuggled together on her sofa. Justin clowning with Harley Mannequin. Herself, laughing, with her hands over her ears, as he made her listen to a Strauss opera. They were moments frozen into her memory, but she felt cheated now, realizing she had shared them with someone else. Someone who was watching their every move.

  She clicked through the rest of the photographs. Justin had successfully kept one aspect of his life secret. There were no pictures of his safe house. There was nothing to suggest that Ritchie knew where this house was, which meant that he hadn’t been the one to search it. She wondered how Justin had concealed the location; he’d obviously come here often, and yet somehow he’d made sure that he wasn’t followed. That was one advantage of being paranoid. You took precautions.

  And yet everywhere else Justin had been, Curtis Ritchie had been there, too. She flipped forward and backward, going faster and faster, hypnotized by everything she saw. For a few brief moments, Justin was alive again.

  Justin in Starbucks.

  Justin in the produce aisle at Publix.

  Justin on the sponge docks in Tarpon Springs.

  Justin in Starbucks again.

  Justin in Lake Wales. She recognized the environs. Ritchie had followed Justin on the secret trip he made to Lake Wales without her. She saw him at the library. At the Bok Sanctuary. Out on a deserted stretch of highway. Walking out of Dr Smeltz’s office with a backpack slung over his arm.

  The next photograph showed Justin in a parking lot near the doctor’s office. He had something in his hand that looked like the same kind of medical file that Peach had retrieved from the locked supply closet.

  What was the file? And where was it now? Whoever had searched his safe house must have found it and removed it.

  She kept flipping through the pictures. The camera flashed a warning that the battery was almost dead. It would go black soon. When the camera died, she knew she would feel alone again. Looking at the pictures made her feel that Justin was with her.

  Justin at the Pier.

  Justin in an antiquarian bookstore.

  Justin in Starbucks again.

  He’d been in Starbucks a lot, which wasn’t unusual, but something about the picture attracted her eyes. The photo was taken from outsid
e, through the shop window. Justin was at a table with his back to the camera, but he wasn’t alone. Someone else sat across from him, but all Peach could see when she zoomed in was an arm. A female arm. Justin was meeting a woman at the coffee shop.

  Who?

  She clicked to the next photograph, which was taken at the same Starbucks on the same day. Ritchie was inside now, at the counter. The angle was reversed. The off-kilter photo showed Justin from the front, and his companion’s back was to the camera. Peach stared at the back of a woman’s head. Stared at luscious, long dark hair.

  Peach began to hear every breath in her chest. She felt dizzy. The throb of a headache split open her forehead. She didn’t want to see the next photograph, but she had no choice. She knew what she would see, because she recognized the woman now. She watched the picture fill the small screen, and there she was.

  Annalie.

  Annalie was at the table with Justin.

  PART FOUR

  HIT AND RUN

  44

  The receptionist at the police department in St Pete Beach laughed at Cab over the phone. ‘I’m sorry, could you say that again, Detective? I really want to be sure I heard you correctly.’

  ‘You’ve got an ex-con named Frank Macy whose driver’s license record indicates that he has an apartment in St Pete Beach,’ he repeated. ‘I’d like you to roll a couple uniforms over there to see if he’s in his apartment now.’

  ‘You want us to bring some bagels or scones over there with us?’ the receptionist asked.

  ‘That’s funny,’ Cab said. ‘I appreciate your sense of humor. I know my timing isn’t exactly perfect—’

  ‘Perfect? Detective, maybe you haven’t looked outside your window recently, but we have a tropical storm on top of our heads right now. If you look west, you’ll probably see Dorothy and Toto blowing past you any minute. So as hard as you may find this to believe, we’re not just sitting around the station watching repeats of Burn Notice. We’re a little busy out here. And we don’t have time to send our officers on babysitting detail for some ex-con.’

  ‘I just want to know if he’s there,’ Cab insisted.

  ‘Then I suggest you drive out here yourself and knock on his door,’ she snapped. ‘Now I’ve got about a hundred other calls on hold, and some of them may actually be important. Happy Fourth of July, Detective.’

  She hung up.

  Cab didn’t blame her. Nothing would get attention today other than the storm.

  He threw his phone on the passenger seat of the Corvette. He was still parked outside the wrought-iron gate of Diane’s estate. The neighborhood around him was empty. Some of the residents had probably left town ahead of Chayla, and all the others were inside, cursing the fact that the storm had landed on a summer holiday. As he watched, the lights glowing in the palatial homes went dark. He didn’t see lights anywhere now. Not on the street. Not inside Diane’s estate. The power was out. The morning was already grim under the black sky, and the outage seemed to extinguish the last glimmer of life.

  Cab got out of the car. Despite his black trench coat, he was already wet to his skin where the rain streamed under his collar. He shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the dense foliage closing in around the estate. The brick walls were overgrown with ivy. Trees knelt down and stretched out their branches on both sides of the walls.

  He walked to the end of Coachman Street, where the elegant cobblestones ended. He followed the wall of Diane’s estate, avoiding the rivers overflowing out of the curbs. Flying leaves made a kind of green snow in the air. Where the road turned, he found a row of compact bungalows on a tree-lined street. There were no cars anywhere. Everyone had pulled their vehicles inside the safety of their garages. He saw no lights here either. The outage covered the entire block.

  Turning in the opposite direction, he followed Richards Street to where it ended two hundred yards later at Asbury Place. Nothing was different here. The area felt equally desolate and dark. No cars on the street in either direction. No power. He glanced at a house on the north side of the T-intersection that was obviously deserted, with boarded-up windows and NO TRESPASSING signs posted on the front door. Another foreclosure house among thousands in Florida.

  Cab walked toward the bay, where the houses got larger again. He could see the wild panorama ahead of him, besieged by the storm. The thin trunks of the palm trees were bent over like question marks. A spiny frond slapped his face so hard that it felt like the cut of a knife, and when he touched his hand to his cheek, it came away with blood that was quickly washed clean by the driving rain. It was growing more and more unsafe to be outside in the storm. There were no perceptible threats in the neighborhood around him, but that didn’t make him feel better. The threats that bothered him were the ones he couldn’t see.

  Cab returned along the sidewalk of Bayshore Boulevard to the corner of Diane’s sprawling estate. He didn’t see anyone on the streets. When he climbed into his Corvette, he realized that the sheer pounding of the storm had left his muscles aching and stifled his hearing. He glanced in the mirror and saw that the cut on his cheek had stopped bleeding. His blond hair lay flat on his head.

  He grabbed his phone.

  He scrolled through his recent calls and found the number from which Ramona Cortes had invited him to lunch. He dialed the number, but there was no answer on her private cell phone. He left a message asking her to call him, and then he found the number for the offices of the Attorney General in Tallahassee. It was a public holiday, but he suspected that the office would be staffed while Chayla was assaulting the Gulf coast in the middle of a statewide campaign. Three transfers later, he found himself connected to a senior aide to Ramona Cortes.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Detective,’ she told him, ‘but Attorney General Cortes isn’t in the Tallahassee office today.’

  ‘I understand. It’s important that I talk to her soon. We had lunch on Monday, and she asked me to stay in touch on an investigation I’m running.’ That was partly true, so he didn’t feel guilty about fudging the facts.

  ‘Let me see what I can do, Detective.’

  Cab hung up, but before he could decide on his next move, his phone rang again. Not more than five minutes had passed.

  ‘Detective Bolton? It’s Jaci Muzamel. I’m Ramona’s personal assistant. I understand you’re trying to reach her.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I have instructions to put you through if you call. Ramona is still in Tampa for the campaign, but unfortunately, she’s not reachable right now.’

  Cab was surprised that Ramona had anticipated that he might call her again – and that she would consider it a priority to take his call. ‘It would be helpful if I could talk to her as soon as possible,’ Cab said. ‘I know the storm is causing problems everywhere.’

  ‘It is, but the storm’s not really the issue. Ramona is very regimented about her workout routine. I’m not even sure a hurricane would keep her away from the club. She always turns off her phone. It’s the one hour of the day she keeps to herself.’

  Cab glanced up the street toward Bayshore Boulevard. ‘Is that the Tampa Yacht Club? That’s where I met her for lunch.’

  ‘Actually, it is.’

  ‘Well, I’m not far away from there,’ Cab said. ‘Would she mind if I drove over and met her in person?’

  ‘I think that would be fine. She was adamant that she wanted to talk to you if you tried to reach her. I’ll call ahead to the club and have them let you in.’

  ‘I appreciate it,’ Cab said.

  He put down the phone and headed out on the deserted streets. The Tampa Yacht Club was only a mile away. He wondered if Ramona would still be happy to talk to him when she found out that he wanted to ask questions about an old client named Frank Macy.

  45

  Annalie.

  Annalie had lied to her. She’d lied from the very beginning. She knew Justin.

  Peach checked the date of the photograph on Curtis Ritchie’s camera and saw that th
e picture had been taken only a week before Justin was killed. A week – just before he dropped off the radar. Annalie was part of the plot. Either she had killed Justin herself, or she knew who did. Then she’d wormed her way into a job at Common Way in order to find out what Justin knew.

  Part of her mission was deceiving Peach. Pretending to protect her. Pretending to be her friend. All the while, Annalie had tracked everything that Peach was doing, and like a fool, Peach had played right into her game.

  She thought about Deacon’s message.

  If Macy is involved in something, he’s not doing this alone. Don’t trust anybody.

  She thought about Annalie’s odd reticence in sharing details about her past. She’d written it off to her own paranoia, because she needed a friend. She’d overlooked all the signs that this woman knew more about Justin – and about herself – than someone from the outside should ever have known. She’d trusted Annalie.

  A mistake. She stared at the living room in Justin’s safe house, which had been searched from top to bottom, and she thought: Annalie was the one who searched the house.

  And now Peach had invited her back here. Annalie – who always carried a gun and had shoved that gun into Frank Macy’s face, as if they were strangers.

  They weren’t strangers. They were partners. Working together.

  Peach had to get out of the house. She didn’t want to be here when Annalie arrived. Her emotions would betray her. Annalie would take one look at Peach’s face, and she would realize that Peach knew. If it were about anything else, she could wear a disguise, but this was about Justin. She couldn’t stare at this woman and cover up her rage.

  She grabbed Ritchie’s digital camera and Toughbook. Before she left, she hurried back into the bedroom, grabbed the photo of herself out of the frame on the small table, and shoved it into her back pocket. That was private. That was between her and Justin, and she didn’t want to leave it for anyone else to find.